RONNIE DUGGER

What Are We In?

A lawyer friend of mine in Indiana, David Stutsman, phoned me last
spring at 3:30 in the morning. He hadn't been able to sleep thinking
about the theft of the presidential election, the theft of the
country. During our talking in that dead of night he asked a question
I only heard echoing around in my mind later: "What are we in?"

What are we in? Since last December, and now since Sept. 11, we
are in history. But what is this? What are we in?

AFTER THE SECRET four-month constitutional convention in
Philadelphia in 1787, a matron of the city asked Benjamin Franklin
what they had produced.

"A Republic, if you can keep it," Franklin said.

Well, we haven't kept it -- we've lost it. George W. Bush, his
lawyers led by the crafty James Baker III, Bush's operatives in
Florida led by his brother Jeb the governor and Secretary of State
Kathryn Harris, and five members of the Supreme Court usurped from
the people the right to choose the president of the United States.
When Bush was sworn in as president by Chief Justice Rehnquist the
government itself was seized in a judicial and presidential coup
d'etat.

Our elections are bought, and we know that. Our government is
bought, and we know that. Congress and the Presidency had already
been delegitimized across the past 20 years, for most of us, by the
triumph over the common good of uncontrolled campaign finance
corruption and bribery.

Since January 20th the beneficiaries of the court's scandalous
seizure of the presidency have organized this illegal government,
unilaterally abandoned international arms control, gutted the
government's revenues, prepared to gut Social Security, and launched
a deceitful crusade for military control of the world with weapons
circling in space under the cover of "missile defense."

The truth is so astounding we go on as if it were not true. But as
an historian of the French Revolution, George Lefebvre, has written,
"We cannot run history over like an experiment in a laboratory." The
truth is the truth.

ON THE MORNING of Sept. 11, mass murderers turned our
loaded airliners into weapons of mass destruction and slaughtered
more than 6,000 people from 81 countries. On the ensuing Friday,
Bush, in his role as president, declared that "we're at war,"
although Congress, the only constitutional source for such a
declaration, has not declared war. The government admits that we have
no proof (as of the date of this writing) that there was any nation
behind the attacks to declare war against, yet again, on Sept. 25,
Bush said, "we're at war."

Please consult whatever dictionary you may have. War is armed
conflict between states or nations or their leaders or between
parties within a nation. When individuals in a private terrorist
organization attack buildings with airliners and thereby murder
thousands of civilians en masse, that is not war, that is a crime
against humanity.

Although the media have not stressed the fact, the use-of-force
law that Congress passed was not a declaration of war and
specifically limits the authorization granted the president to the
terms of the War Powers Act, which keeps the president accountable to
Congress for emergency use of military force.

Mass murderer Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda should be branded
as pariahs the world over and brought to justice. The legal basis for
doing this, with or without the permission of the Taliban, is the
right to self-defense enshrined in the UN charter. Assuming that our
appeals to the Taliban to hand over bin Laden and his terrorists
continue to be rejected and if militarily and logistically it makes
good sense, a multilateral force including our special forces should
penetrate or parachute into Afghan territory and assault to capture
bin Laden and the Al Qaeda network wherever they can be found.

But the mass murder of our 6,000 innocents does not give us a
warrant to mass murder 6,000 or any other number of innocents in
Afghanistan. At least a million of those 25 million people are at
risk of starvation, their average annual income is $800 a person, and
they live on the average only to the age of 41. Neither can we just
declare and wage war against Iraq, or Sudan, as William Safire and
writers in the Wall Street Journal are openly advocating.

The darkest thing ethically, and the worst for American standing
in the world, would be tit-for-tat bombing of cities in Afghanistan,
killing innocent civilians as ours have been killed, or declaring war
on some other Islamic dictatorship under the ruthless and apocalyptic
theory of preventive war.

The answer to mass murder is not mass murder, it is going forward
to form an international democratic government that can ensure
international justice that can be enforced by multilateral armed
force if necessary. We should demand that the United States Senate,
acting on its own initiative, quickly ratify the International
Criminal Court, which will have jurisdiction over crimes against
humanity. All sorts of concessions about the composition and
jurisdiction of this court were made in order to pacify the Helmses
and Gramms of the US Senate. About 60 nations have already ratified
the treaty to establish it, but the Bush administration is opposed to
ratification. This is the very court before whom the international
community should indict and try bin Laden and everybody guilty in Al
Qaeda who can be found. It would be perfectly in order, if we had
such a court, to contemplate the capture of Saddam Hussein of Iraq
and his trial for crimes against humanity committed when he used
poison gas to slaughter his fellow citizens.

If an American president or an American military unit commits
crimes against humanity, that should also go before the court.
Isolationism and unilateralist nationalism have held sway too long in
the most powerful country in the world; it is way past time for us to
accept our standing in the family of nations as an equal.

Not only should the International Criminal Court be ratified, it
should be given jurisdiction over all truly international crime,
including that committed by transnational corporations.

WHAT ARE WE IN? We have an illegal president, presiding
over an illegal administration, declaring an unconstitutional war and
orchestrating, under the cover of missile defenses, American
development of weapons circling in space which would give the United
States control of every nation on earth.

What has been true since the corporate takeover of the Democratic
Party in the first half of the seventies is no truer now, but now
it's out here in the open for all of us to see. The issue before us
is who governs, who decides, who controls the people or the gigantic
corporations and their political puppets.

Felix Rohatyn, the famous investment banker in New York City, said
on Charlie Rose, on PBS, last Dec. 21 -- I wrote it down at
the time -- "The government should be the minority stockholder, and
the private sector ought to be the dominating factor." There is the
truth of the intention, coming from Wall Street. There is the issue:
the people, or the corporations. There is the issue: democracy.

ONE ANSWER FOR DEMOCRACY has been struck upon by the
Maverick Alliance for Democracy in San Antonio. For the past three
years they have been sponsoring multi-organizational gatherings of
many progressive, populist and community organizations under the
name, Independent Allies. They meet every two weeks at Estela's on
the West Side. During a part of the program called "Noticias," a
representative from each participating organization tells what it's
up to. "Independent Allies" is not an organization, but a
communications protocol and center, and some of us are interested in
extending the idea of it across the state and into the country.
[For more information on the group, phone Bob Brischetto at
830-612-3643 or email brischetto@wireweb.net.]

It is time for us to form now, among all our organizations, the
Equal Independent Allies, one national people's movement, independent
of any political party, to demand and fight, for example, for --

* Public funding of our elections.

* Single-payer national health insurance.

* The restoration of the corporate tax system and the
progressivity of the income tax and the replacement of the Social
Security payroll tax with the income tax.

* Limits on the size of corporations, the cancellation of their
alleged "personhood" and their alleged constitutional rights.

* Limits on personal wealth, and a guaranteed annual income.

* Free education as high as any student can make the grades.

* First-home building subsidies and the opening of some public
lands as trust lands for homesteading.

* Equal rights and equal pay for women.

* A living wage for every working person.

* The legalization of undocumented immigrants who have been here a
few years and work and/or have families here.

* Repeal of the Taft-Hartley law and criminal prosecution of
corporations that bedevil union organizers.

* Clean energy, wind and solar, and the phasing down and
as-soon-as-possible out of oil, coal, and nuclear power.

* International trade for people and the environment everywhere. A
sharing of the wealth of the rich nations including ours with the two
billion people who have no schools and no toilets.

* And world citizenship, an international democracy, a
constitution worthy of the human race.

I don't think we have much time here in our beloved country.
Although for some years I have been skeptical about electoral
politics as a way of fixing a country where bribery has been
legalized, I have become convinced, in the history we are in, that
if, in what time we have, we are to form a new government for our
country to replace the one that we have lost, we must use electoral
politics as nonviolent revolt. My idea is to try to find people
somewhat like Huey Long, without his corruption or crypto-fascism,
willing to defy the leaders of the Democratic and Republican Parties
in Washington, to be candidates for governor or US senator as Greens,
as independents, as rebellious Democrats, or even as rebellious
Republicans (if that is not an oxymoron), in as many states as we can
get going for 2002, so that by the time we get to 2005, we will not
be staring again at either George W. Bush or Albert Gore.

Ronnie Dugger was founding editor of The Texas
Observer and is a founder of the Alliance for Democracy.
Email RDugger123@aol.com.